IBM's Data-Visualization Champion

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In 2002, IBM staffers took notice of Wattenberg's work, which he presented at the annual InfoVis conference, hosted yearly by the Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, a trade organization. It's the biggest gathering of data-visualization experts in the world, attracting representatives from the likes of Yahoo! (YHOO) and AT&T (ATT).

"We always dabbled in information visualization. It was always important to us to find designers who could suggest alternative interfaces for software and present different views," recalls Irene Greif, who is the director of the Collaborative User Experience Group at IBM's Watson Research Center in Cambridge, Mass. "We saw Martin's work at InfoVis, and had him in to meet us. We were interested in the fact that he's an artist, a computer scientist, and a mathematician. We thought he could talk to every constituency." Wattenberg joined Big Blue in May, 2002, where he currently works as a researcher and manages a staff of four at the Visual Communication Lab in Cambridge.

The Value of Collaboration

There, Wattenberg has been focusing mostly on the relationships between collaboration and data visualization, with two goals: to investigate how the public collaborates online (via wikis and other tools) and to develop software concepts that might one day make it into IBM products for companies and consumers.

In 2003, he created his first high-profile project for IBM, a software application called History Flow, in collaboration with Viégas, at the time a PhD candidate in media arts and sciences at MIT's famed Media Lab who was interning with him. (She has since joined joined the company to work with Wattenberg full time.) History Flow traces the editing and writing patterns on Wikipedia, the collaborative online encyclopedia that relies on posts from users around the globe for its content. The result is a series of visualizations of Wikipedia entries on topics such as "capitalism," that show swooping lines and dramatic graphs that resemble the Grand Canyon. The tool is available for free at IBM's Web site.

Though that project is still live, for now Wattenberg and Viégas are focusing on how people are using Many Eyes—both in the public, online sphere and internally within IBM. "As a research project, Many Eyes is showing and highlighting what was wrong with our previous knowledge management," says Greif. "Suddenly, we're seeing data fly off our employees' hard disks and from their minds and into this application. And I can say there are IBM [product development] groups that are actively planning to use some aspect of Many Eyes in their products" for consumers.

For his part, Wattenberg couldn't be more pleased to share the "aha!" moments. (To see a slide show of Wattenberg's data-visualization projects, click here.)

Jana is a writer with BusinessWeek.com in New York.